Fugu Ultra vs Gemma-4 12B Coder

What I tested — same prompt, two models

I run the same fixed prompt set through every new model the day it drops — same string, one shot, single HTML file out — and I score the result 0–10 on whether it ran, how close it hit the brief, and how good it looked. Below is what came out when I gave the exact same prompts to Fugu Ultra and Gemma-4 12B Coder, side by side, on 2 shared tasks inside the Agent Operating System.

Both models were given identical prompts inside the Agent Operating System — no help, no iteration, no "best of N" tricks. I run each prompt once, save the HTML file the model produces, and score it 0–10 on whether it ran, how close it hit the brief, and how good it looked. The scoring is mine. The verdicts below are pulled from my source comparison guides at agentos.guide where I publish every score and the reasoning behind it.

Fugu Ultra · Dispatched from Agent OS as the panel-ensemble alternative to OpenRouter Fusion. Bench scored by Claude judge against the same 42 prompts as every other model.

Gemma-4 12B Coder · Wired into the Agent OS local engine (Local chat + Local Hermes Engine + Agent Kanban) as the free, offline coder. Scored by Claude judge against the same one-shot prompts every other model ran.

Where Fugu Ultra beat Gemma-4 12B Coder

The tasks where I gave Fugu Ultra a higher 0–10 score on the same prompt — with the actual commentary from my source guides.

Strengths & weaknesses I logged

Pricing & context — the spec sheet

The verdict — which should you pick?

Across 2 scored shared tasks, Fugu Ultra averaged 8.75/10, beating Gemma-4 12B Coder's 6.00/10 by 2.75 points. Pick Fugu Ultra when the build has to ship on the first prompt and you can afford the trade-offs in the comparison below.

If you only run one of these inside your stack, the head-to-head average above is the call. If you can run both, my honest play is to wire Fugu Ultra and Gemma-4 12B Coder both into the Agent Operating System and dispatch each from the kanban by task type — teams that want fusion-class quality but need a different vendor risk profile → Fugu Ultra, free, private, offline coding where nothing can leave your machine → Gemma-4 12B Coder. That's the same setup I run for the 3,600+ founders inside the AI Profit Boardroom.

FAQ — Fugu Ultra vs Gemma-4 12B Coder

Which is better, Fugu Ultra or Gemma-4 12B Coder?

On Goldie Bench, Fugu Ultra averages 8.75/10 across the shared tasks, with 3 gold, 1 silver, 0 bronze overall. Gemma-4 12B Coder averages 6.00/10, with 0 gold, 0 silver, 0 bronze. Fugu Ultra wins the head-to-head 2–0.

How much does Fugu Ultra cost vs Gemma-4 12B Coder?

Fugu Ultra: Sakana's multi-agent orchestration: a single API call internally dispatches to multiple frontier models and synthesises the answer. Subscription plans run $20-$200/mo (Standard / Pro / Max); PAYG is $5/M input + $30/M output for Fugu Ultra. Direct competitor to OpenRouter Fusion's panel approach. Gemma-4 12B Coder: A community fine-tune of Google's Gemma-4 12B (xentriom/gemma-4-12B-coder-fable5-composer2.5-v1), Apache-2.0. Free to download and run 100% offline on your own Mac via Ollama — no API, no per-token bill. The Q4_K_M build is 7.4GB.

What's the context window for Fugu Ultra vs Gemma-4 12B Coder?

Fugu Ultra has a 272,000 tokens with the standard rate. Calls exceeding 272K context are billed at the higher 'long-context' rates. context window. Gemma-4 12B Coder has a 256,000 tokens context window.

When should I pick Fugu Ultra over Gemma-4 12B Coder?

Pick Fugu Ultra for: Teams that want Fusion-class quality but need a different vendor risk profile; Operators avoiding export-controlled providers (Sakana emphasises this in their pitch); Deep-research workflows where ensemble verdicts beat single-model answers. The trade-off is the weaknesses we logged on the bench: Panel orchestration adds latency — even a 'pong' burns ~2k orchestration tokens; Newer than Fusion; less community calibration on long-tail prompts.

When should I pick Gemma-4 12B Coder over Fugu Ultra?

Pick Gemma-4 12B Coder for: Free, private, offline coding where nothing can leave your machine; Landing pages, simple canvas builds, and code you'll review before shipping; Anyone who wants a $0 local coder wired into their Agent OS. The trade-off is the weaknesses we logged on the bench: Half its one-shots shipped broken on the bench — a missing canvas append, a missing render loop, and an uncompiled WebGL shader; Far below frontier models on complex 3D / WebGL / games — strongest on pages and simple canvas work, not simulations.

How does Goldie Bench score Fugu Ultra vs Gemma-4 12B Coder?

Every demo on this page was built by Julian Goldie inside the Agent Operating System — same fixed prompt for both models, one shot, single HTML file out. Each result gets a 0–10 score on whether it ran, how close it hit the brief, and how good it looked. The highest score on each task gets gold; second gets silver; third gets bronze. See methodology for full provenance.

Related comparisons

Other head-to-heads using the same scoring system:

Full model pages: Fugu Ultra · Gemma-4 12B Coder · back to the leaderboard